It’s laughable to cry “whataboutism” when discussing international politics. Comparing how countries act in similar situations is one of the foundations of international law.

Which politicians, and what is your source for popular opinions in Hong Kong?

The ur-gooner

Love how you counter concrete, material facts like “guaranteed housing, employment, and childcare” with fact-free scare mongering like “political pressure” and “control over the media.”

There’s never any analysis about what this shit really means. “The fucking stasi” gets thrown out there like “the boogeyman” without even a thought towards how the U.S. security state violently repressed a nationwide movement against police violence in 2020, or how right now that same security state is violently repressing people protesting the genocide we’re supplying. You’re supposed to belive the stasi is the worst thing possible without ever digging into how it functioned, and certainly without asking how it compared to other states.

See also:

A new book by Kristen Ghodsee, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that women have better sex under socialism.

If that sounds strange to you, consider this: A survey of East and West Germans after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women (the socialist side of Germany during the Cold War) had twice as many orgasms as Western women.

What in the world accounts for such a wide gap?

According to Ghodsee, it’s about social safety nets. If, she argues, you build a society that supports women and doesn’t punish them for having children or devalue their labor, it turns out they’ll be happier and have better sex.

But it doesn’t matter how many studies or surveys or policy differences you point to – some guy always has an old relative whose story outweighs everything.

We agree that critical support is the best position, we agree on how crucial Hamas is in Palestine’s anti-imperialist struggle, we agree that Hamas is not perfect.

I don’t know how a concept this familiar to leftists, that we agree on, that I’ve plainly stated multiple times, is interpreted negatively by other leftists.

Of course there are things wrong with Hamas. It endorses some reactionary social views and is not a socialist organization, but a national liberation one. I support them where they fight against imperialism but disagree with them where they’re reactionary or hostile to socialism. This is the best take for Iran and Russia, too. It only plays into liberal imperialism if you use it as an excuse for supporting the U.S. or its client states, which I’m not doing.

On the referenced link, as a cracker, I get why people don’t trust us. We have not been great organizationally in the past. We have to earn trust.

There’s a big difference between “white people have to work more to earn trust” and “I don’t trust a white person unless they have a biracial kid, and even then maybe not.” As I said in that comment, there is no AES state that approaches racism and discrimination that way, and it’s a dead end in terms of building a mass movement in the U.S.

If a lib reads this, they’re going to think “yeah, that is whataboutism.” We have to refute the idea that comparing countries is somehow bad analysis, not just mock the thought-terminating cliche they use.

I usually go with “comparing different countries’ actions is the foundation of international law” or paraphrase Parenti’s comment about how you don’t judge governments against utopia, you judge them against what they replaced (and their peers, too).

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Aren’t you the guy who constantly curves the colonized who bring up successful struggle against their settlers?

That’s a link to a thread about working class people being more generous about sharing small costs, where I point out that class traitors have played prominent roles in every successful revolution, and should be encouraged.

How is that related to “critical support is the best take, not a blanket endorsement”

You’ll get the same response if you say critical support from the jump.

Yes, but it doesn’t land the same when you say critical support from beginning to end. If you start with “good” and switch to “critical support” that comes off as backtracking or trying to weasel around what you mean.

but it’s a meme and “it’s good” works so much better.

It’s just not that great of a meme. It flattens the best take (critical support) into something resembling what the pro-genocide crowd accuses us of (blindly endorsing even the bad parts of anti-imperialist resistance).

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“XYZ is good” is invariably read as blanket approval of everything XYZ does. That’s not what we mean, so we shouldn’t say it.

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You got bodied and took it like a piss baby

grow up, get a job, buy a calculator

“The only people who struggle with housing costs are stupid children”

Still no sources on anything, and you’re not even staying on the topic at hand.

Cuba now has a privileged elite defending it’s grip on power against the poor majority

Source this.

“It’s their fault” is not an objective viewpoint. You are assigning blame to Cuba and excusing the U.S.